Magic Mirror
mixed
This was a project that had quite a history. It's first run was back in university as an extracurricular exercise, but never got finished.
Then after graduating, I found an old 22" TV in a thrift store that worked great! I modified it so I could plug in a raspberry pi zero w to the on-board usb, and then hook up a short hdmi between the two.
I added a wood frame around the electronics and originally had cut a piece of plexiglas, but that got warped, so I picked up a cheap picture from a thrift store and cut the glass to size, added the reflective film, and hot glued it in place.
Getting gui applications to launch from ssh was a challenge, but I learned how linux handles displays more and was able to get it to work. Essentially all it does is start a chromium browser in full screen that points to a local webserver (apache with php), and the web page handles the rest.
I have the javascript query local php scripts that interpret external data and either relay and/or store it locally to reduce network traffic. I used wikipedia for "Today in History", openweathermap for weather data, and an embedded google calendar for upcoming appointments and the likes. There was quite a bit of tinkering needed to get the calendar to look nice since google doesn't allow access to the data itself, just their rendering of it.
You can view the github page with the code on it here.
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- Landfall